The Shoeshine Boy Who Won the World Cup

In a small house in Brazil, in July 1950, a family sat around a radio. The whole country was listening. Brazil was playing Uruguay in the last match of the World Cup, in front of an enormous crowd at the new Maracanã stadium in Rio de Janeiro. Everyone expected Brazil to win.

Brazil lost.

A nine-year-old boy looked at his father and saw that he was crying. He had never seen his father cry before. The boy went to him and made a promise: one day, he would win the World Cup for him.

The boy's name was Edson Arantes do Nascimento. The world would call him Pelé.

A ball made of socks

Edson was born in 1940 in Três Corações, a small town in the state of Minas Gerais, and grew up in Bauru, in the state of São Paulo. His father, known as Dondinho, was a talented footballer, but a bad knee injury had cut his career short. After that, he earned very little. Edson's mother, Celeste, kept the household going, and there was often not enough money even for basic things.

Edson helped where he could. As a boy he worked as a shoeshine, carrying a little wooden box around the town and polishing people's shoes for a few coins.

He and his friends could not afford a real football. So they made one, by stuffing an old sock with rags or crumpled newspaper and tying it up with string. They played barefoot in the streets, for hours, until it was too dark to see.

Nobody is quite sure where the nickname "Pelé" came from. He himself said he did not know for certain, and that as a boy he disliked it. But it stuck.

A father's lessons

Dondinho could not give his son money, but he could give him football. He passed on what he knew about the game, and he showed his son that a footballer had to work and practise, not just play.

His mother was less happy. She had seen what football had done to her husband's knee, and how little it had paid. She wanted her son to study and find steady work. Pelé later wrote with great love about both his parents, and about how hard it was for her to let him go.

As a teenager, Edson played for a local youth team coached by Waldemar de Brito, a former Brazil player. De Brito saw that this thin, quick boy was something special. When Edson was fifteen, de Brito took him to the city of Santos, to try out for one of Brazil's leading clubs.

Edson was homesick and scared. But he was good enough. Santos signed him, and within months he was playing, and scoring, for the first team.

Sweden, 1958

At sixteen, Pelé played his first match for Brazil. The next year, 1958, he was chosen for the World Cup in Sweden. He was seventeen, the youngest player in the tournament.

He arrived with an injured knee and missed Brazil's first two matches. Many people thought he was too young to play anyway. Then, for the third match, the coaches put him in the team.

In the quarter-final against Wales, he scored the only goal of the game. In the semi-final against France, he scored three. And in the final, against Sweden, the home team, he scored two more, including one in which he lifted the ball over a defender's head and volleyed it into the net before it touched the ground.

Brazil won 5–2. They were champions of the world for the first time.

When the final whistle blew, the seventeen-year-old was overcome. He sank to the grass, and then cried on the shoulders of his teammates. Eight years after that sad day around the radio, the boy had kept his promise to his father.

The king of football

Back home, Brazil celebrated as never before. Pelé went on to win the World Cup twice more, in 1962 and 1970, the only player ever to win it three times. He scored more goals than almost anyone in the history of the game, and became one of the most famous people on Earth.

His success changed his family's life. The boy who had polished shoes for coins was able to look after the parents who had raised him with so little. In 1969, when he scored his thousandth goal, as it was counted at the time, he dedicated it to the poor children of Brazil.

Pelé died in December 2022, at the age of eighty-two. Brazil declared three days of national mourning.

People still talk about his goals. But many remember, too, the boy with a ball made of socks, and the promise he made to a father who was crying.

Want to read more?

Pelé told his own story in Pelé: The Autobiography and in Why Soccer Matters, which describes the 1950 final and his promise to his father. Match records from the 1958 World Cup are kept by FIFA.